Piece-wise EEG analysis: an objective evaluation

In this paper, a method is described to evaluate EEGs by means of a piece-wise analysis. The procedure involves the recursive computation of a 5th-order autoregressive model by means of a Kalman filter. As an illustration the result of applying this method to sleep recordings is described in this paper. Also, an objective comparison of this method with a more conventional approach (based on analyzing 30-s intervals), and with adaptive segmentation (Praetorius et al., 1977) was carried out using the same data. The results obtained indicate that our method is useful in extracting elementary patterns from an EEG and that the piece-wise analysis approach is to be favored over more conventional techniques.